Memeorandum

March 05, 2019

The Center-Left Flees The Field

Ross Douthat on the collapse of the center left. He makes a good point: The Rubinomics "center-left" focused on economics issues, such as trade, tax reform and health care but unlike Bill Clinton were silent on cultural issues.

Ross barely mentions the great trainwreck of the day, which has also been the trainwreck in Europe, to wit, immigration, especially illegal immigration. He does say this:

But then consider a third distillation, a third narrative, in which the center-left’s signal political failure was that it never really sought to preserve a cultural centrism, which meant over time that its party’s approach to social issues has been dictated more and more completely by the left. In this story the political success of Bill Clinton reflected not only his compromises with Republicans on taxes and spending, his tacit nods to Reaganomics, but also his ability to infuse a centrist liberalism with reassuring nods to various kinds of moderate cultural conservatism — the school uniform and v-chip business and the rhetoric of “safe, legal and rare” on abortion, the easy Baptist religiosity, the tacitly center-right positions on immigration and crime and same-sex marriage.

If Clinton had matched this cultural conservatism with decency in his private life, Al Gore would have won re-election as his heir and the larger story of the center-left might have been entirely different. But instead, from the mid-2000s onward, the leftward flank of the Democratic Party looked at the country’s changing demographics and growing social liberalism and decided that Clinton’s compromises with cultural conservatism weren’t as politically necessary as they had been (which was true), and that therefore they were free to become increasingly ideologically maximalist on everything touching gender or race or sexuality or immigration (which was … not true).

Team Rubinomics fled the field on immigration, which has clear economic and cultural components. As an example, in 2006 Krugman briefly touched the third rail and acknowledged, citing Borjas, that unskilled immigrants (legal or otherwise) depress the wages of the native unskilled.

By 2017 Krugman had more comforting studies and realized that such a conclusion was "wrong", although the once-admired Borjas continues to push it. Thank heaven for the liberal take-over of academia!

So what happened? Please. Peter Beinart explains the obvious - faith in their emerging Democacratic majority and rising political correctness pushed the Democrats to their current "Stop hating, hater" position on illegal immigration.

A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”

Let's not overlook Big Business, which had sway with both Democrats and the Chamber of Commerce Republicans:

Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.

The experience of unreconstructed socialist Bernie Sanders was instructive:

This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”

Say what?!? Americans first?

Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”

"Proven incorerect"! Yet as a political theory it worked for Trump and here we are. Beinart goes on:

But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”

It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.

There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.

Wow. How could so many be so wrong? Beinart mentions that some academics are funded by, eg, Microsoft. But his second point will surprise no one:

Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”

Beinart goes on to float all sorts of proposals that would address the conflicting concerns of two groups the Democrats claim to care about, unskilled natives and immigrants. That is a conversation a center-left could lead, but it won't be happening. Lest you trail off before what seems to be his punchline I will put it here:

Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.

Promoting assimilation neednot mean expecting immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.

As if. Beinart goes on:

The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.

Uh huh.

Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them.

Oh, "English spoken here". That will happen.

And if you have made it this far:

Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man with a Muslim-sounding name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.

n 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same?

Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.

He may be right about Clinton winning but obviously she didn't and couldn't say those things within her party today.

Kind of grim - when the proposed solutions are this far from possible for the Democrats one wonders where we are headed.

the political success of Bill Clinton reflected not only his compromises with Republicans on taxes and spending, his tacit nods to Reaganomics, but also his ability to infuse a centrist liberalism with reassuring nods to various kinds of moderate cultural conservatism — the school uniform and v-chip business and the rhetoric of “safe, legal and rare” on abortion, the easy Baptist religiosity, the tacitly center-right positions on immigration and crime and same-sex marriage.

It was all bullshit and lies with Slick, which is why he never received 50% of the popular vote. The GOP running hapless Failure Theater candidates like GHWB and Dole were the only reasons he won.

"Kind of grim - when the proposed solutions are this far from possible for the Democrats one wonders where we are headed."

Kind of grim is how I feel about the direction the left and media (synonymous, why do I separate them, they are identical) are driving our country. The ideological juggernaut driving us seems to have no brakes since the GOPe has refused to help our president.

I felt sick to my stomach when I read this article posted on lucianne, which ties in directly to Mr. Maguire's topic for today. And, what a depressing topic it is -- unchecked immigration with no assimilation, whether legal or illegal.

Henry, isn't it hilarious to see the Democrats develop this sudden reverence for the rule of law and assimilation. I'm trying to imagine Beinart writing this and keeping a straight face:

The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero.

Translation: The next candidate can say that again and again because the smart folks, like Beinart, know it's only campaign talk. Pap for the dummies and deplorables.

How can Obama create a university of social change when his minions have already created that chaos? He's way behind the curve.

Totalitarian members of Congress have already raised the red flag and the Cultural Revolution is in full swing. Why Dr. Seuss is now a racist! From my understanding, Horton actually hates Who's. And we all know where the Grinch stood on that. He confiscated all of their toys (guns) after all to create a Grinch-centric world order.

the University of South Dakota Law School declared Aloha Day racist. That just isn't Aloha.

Men are reassigning themselves into women's sports and the women can't win squat anymore.

The Red Guards are out in force and denouncing everyone they find as bourgeois saboteurs, revanchists or not revolutionary enough.

We even have our own Gang of Four; Omer, Ocasio-Castro, Tlaib and Waters (you could add 20-30 more if you like). Pelosi is rapidly losing control and really doesn't have any promise of regaining it.

And the People's Press just acts as scribes for the latest diktats.

The Revolution will not be Televised has changed to CNN's latest fake scandal.

Now in several states there are 2nd Amendment sanctuary cities and counties, New Mexico prominent among them and Oregon right behind. Despite the evidence that 60% of gun deaths are by suicide and the a large majority of the rest are African-Amrican on African-American, the Left continues the sham. But that horse is well out of the barn.

Didn't Michelle Malkin get excoriated just the other day for saying something along the lines of "celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more" at CPAC? Of course, most MSM hit-pieces dropped the "unity" part of the quote.

The center left [and the center right for that matter] has never been anything but a way-station on the road to the Gulag. There is no practical or theoretical limit to progism so whether it takes five years or a hundred, the left's project always ends in tyranny, misery and revolt. Always.

In the fall of 2018, Rider University in New Jersey surveyed students to find out which restaurant they would like to have on campus. Students preferred Chick-fil-A, but that choice was rejected by university leadership, which felt the company’s corporate values were insufficiently inclusive.

...

Rider’s decision to reject the restaurant turned into a public relations challenge, and official talking points were issued for faculty. Cynthia Newman, dean of Rider’s College of Business, is a Christian and resigned her position as a matter of conscience.

...

Newman explained her reasoning to the faculty and staff of the College of Business in her Feb. 14 resignation announcement, a copy of which Campus Reform obtained exclusively. In the announcement, Newman recalled the university rejecting students wanting to bring a Chick-fil-A restaurant to campus because the fast-food chain’s “corporate values have not sufficiently progressed enough to align with those of Rider.”

“As some of you already know, I am a committed follower of Jesus Christ,” Newman says in her announcement. “As such, I endeavor every day to do exactly what Chick-fil-A puts forward as its overarching corporate value: to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to me and to have a positive influence on all who come into contact with me.”

“Everything positive about me and everything I have ever achieved — whether in my personal or my professional life — that is viewed as being good, I fully attribute to God’s working in and through me,” the dean continued. “Anytime I am kind or patient or wise, it is a result of God’s goodness and mercy and my yielding to His presence in my life.”

Saying that she “felt as though I had been punched in the stomach,” Newman noted she met with “those in authority positions over me” about the school’s decision. She said she asked administrators to apologize for Rider’s statement about Chick-fil-A and its “corporate values.” But, she added, that didn’t happen. In fact, the school doubled down.

Our great First Lady (@FLOTUS) will be doing a LIVE show TODAY at 1:00 PM PT with the terrific @EricBolling at the @WestgateVegas Resort. She’s on her #BeBest Tour, helping address the #OpioidCrisis. Free admission for the first 1,500 people!

Compare Cynthia Newman’s willingness to leave a job in defense of her values, to the behavior of all those “good” FBI and DoJ personnel who sit quietly on their hands while evil is done all around them.

ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”

The idea that this "theory" could possibly be proven incorrect is one of the many problems with the "science" of economics (or maybe just the practice of "journalism") today. Either immigrants are getting jobs (and therefore taking jobs) or they are not (and therefore they are burdening our social support system). It is possible (and seems likely in the current Trump economy) that at times there are enough new job opportunities being created by the economy and filled by immigrants to create a net benefit to the overall economy, but unless everybody who has a job is in no danger of losing it or not getting a raise or not getting the better job that they would like to have, the "theory" is pretty much a statement of an obvious truth.

At my university library, you keep your rate of pay even if you drop down into a lesser position. It is quite the plum gig to do a temporary stint as an associate director and then go back to your regular job.

Or, there are even people who get a promotion, absolutely fail at the job, and then drop back to their prior position (no one ever gets fired) and keep making the higher amount.

Just a few moments ago, I signed an EO addressing one of our nation’s most heartbreaking tragedies: VETERANS SUICIDE. To every Veteran—I want you to know that you have an entire nation of more than 300 million people behind you. You will NEVER be forgotten.

Jimmyk:
Your daughter was fantastic.
Good luck in her future decisions.
Totally disagree with TK’s assessment of Cruz.
Definitely stuck in the past.
Cruz has been nothing but supportive to the Trump administration.
Glad he has 6 more years to represent Texas.
Cornyn should be re-elected on the border alone.
Omar should be removed from the foreign relations committee.
AOC now knows her high profile is going to subject her to intense scrutiny.
The downside of her big mouth and self promotion.

The Clintonistas are currently backing Kamala. Someone here suggested to me recently that they are using Kamala to kick off the Clinton campaign because Hillary doesn’t have the stamina for a long campaign. The idea is that Kamala bows out and accepts the VP spot when Hillary jumps in late. That makes a lot of sense.